She always allowed music to follow her around.

She tapped out rhythms

and be-bopped and scat. She crooned

under her breath and hummed contentedly along to the radio.

Her radio.

And, through the crackly, static-y, fuzzy wuzzy white noise, she entered into The Realm .

With the sugar sweet voices from the radio, some slipping, and sliding, and oozing

about her ears as slowly as molasses drips

from the trunk of a tree,

and others flying by her eager ears so quickly that she could not be sure

whether or not

she had even heard them at all. Though

deep inside of herself, where The Realm resided

and the only thing that she could see marring the brilliantly pristine white expanse that she knew The Realm to be, was the radio. And she knew, as the radio crackled

and stuttered

on and on and on,

she knew that she was better off for the experience.

And one day

when she was older and assumed to be wiser, she entered The Realm once more

and she found the expanse,

the brilliant white light, being engulfed

by a dark and penetrating void.

She watched in semi horror and with limbs made of heavy lead,

but blood of fire and ice,

as the world, The Realm, was swallowed up by the darkness and

with her inside of it,

The Realm ceased to be.

And

in this newly formed nightdream daymare realm,

which had no true earthly day or night as she once knew,

but only the overwhelming presence

of a frigid nothingness,

the radio played on still.

And on.

And on.

And on this day when she was older and wiser,

when the darkness without had finally, finally, defiled the purest of pristine places that she held deep within, she turned the radio

OFF.

She removed the radio from its place

on her desk where she had once spent hours deep into the night

turning the knobs and balancing the volume for her fragile ears,

sensitive to the static-y, crackly, hum after ages without quiet, and took it to the cellar.

And so it was pushed

behind boxes and boxes

and stacks and stacks

and jumbles and jumbles

and piles and piles compiled over. . .

she did not know how long.

But the time did not matter,

for she felt sometimes that she had perchance heard

the faintest fuzzy wuzzy crackle

of radio static.

And she decided in those times that

perhaps it was not buried deep enough.

Not yet.

But she began to miss seeing the splendid bursts of the radio’s music behind

her eyelids.

And she began to miss the smiles that graced her own face when she saw the music.

And so she painted them on her eyelids.

She painted the royal blue, goldenrod, and the here or there gently sprinkled indigo of jazz,

and the sea green, periwinkle polka dotted, swirled copper of the bubblegum pop that her mother so detested,

and the dusty tan, richly green, splendid sunshine yellow and sunset orange of the country music that always managed to sneak its way into long car rides home,

and the olive greens, and the ceruleans, and aggressively blinding neon flashes, and the tangerine peach oranges that were too too bright, and a myriad of colors beyond her that she could not begin to name,

and all of the shades of black that did not seem to freeze her legs stiff or boil her down to her bones and stop her heart.

She decided in fact that she liked the black too.

But oh the colors, the colors, the colors. For all the colors that there were, it was not quite right, one was missing.

And after many years of piling and compiling, of boxing, of jumbling, of fumbling, and stacking and packing everything

further and further,

deeper and deeper,

she began to clean up around the cellar, around the realm, where she kept the forgotten things.

And she found the radio once again though by this time, she had pushed it far enough back that she had not heard the crackle, pop, and stutter of its interference

for far too long.

Knowing now what she wanted to do, she smiled. And she turned the radio

ON.

And she listened through the static on and on and on until she heard the sugary sweet molasses voices and the faster than light gone before you know it tunes and. . .

she opened her mouth. . .

“I hate this station,” she said, still smiling.

But

the radio remained placed carefully in her room, front and center, on her rickety wooden desk next to her bed, and, as she closed her eyes and reveled in the colors and the brilliantly pristine white expanse,

the radio remained

ON.